Following the news that anonymous dickheads have forced the premature death of an amusing and often insightful blog by spiteful blackmail, a roundup seems in order.

Crooked Timber – “I�ve alternately enjoyed and been infuriated by John�s blog and he�s certainly been a major irritant to the decent smug and self-satisfied former left and the samizdatistas. Both Daniel and I were regular commenters on John�s site and I�ll miss the mix of friendly repartee and ill-tempered invective there.”

Harry’s Place (rarely fans of John B) – “I would just like to take this opportunity say: what fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking scummy wankers…

“What sort of monumental, spectacular, loss of perspective can have motivated a SBBS reader to have grassed John up in such a shabby fashion.

“Fuck them.”

Chicken Yoghurt – “I just hope you shitweasels who made this happen have a glowing sense of well-being in your solitude this evening as you masturbate into your socks.”

Jim Bliss – “SBBS was never guilty of racism or sexism, but refused to bow to contrived notions of political correctness. If John was guilty of anything, it was of overestimating the ability of his readership to discern the real target of a particular barb.”

Devil’s Kitchen (hardly of the same political views, with a stirling defence of blogging anonymity) – “This is wrong; apart from anything else, it’s just not cricket. Honour comes in where boundaries are not legally set; and on blogs, honour dictates that�no matter how fucked off you are with someone in this medium�it stays in this medium. Whilst I often didn’t agree with John, the real life bleed-through barrier should be sacrosanct.”

Tim Worstall (again, hardly of the same political views) – “Bad news. Very bad news.”

Matt T – “bad news for British blogging, and probably a sign of the rut it is currently in.”

Ducking for Apples – “It would be nice to think that the web is a community of tech-literate, altruistic, friendly people who are proponents of free speech and generally getting on with life in a “do what you will but hurt no-one” kind of way.

“Unfortunately, there seem to be a proportional number of people who get their ya-yas by intimidation, bullying, power-games and trying to control other people.”

Third Avenue – “A chill wind blows through blogland”

Laban Tall (another from the opposite end of the political spectrum) – “This day there’s a gaping hole in the Blogring of Britain, where a precious if somewhat tarnished jewel once shone.”

Backword has another link roundup and ponders whether “Perhaps there�s no higher acclaim that being blackmailed by envious anonymous cunts.”

Finally, my own, more considered opinion – “it would seem that wanting to gas people who complained about Geldof swearing is fine. As long as they aren�t Jewish. Which, in my humble opinion, is significantly more patronisingly racist than anything I�ve ever read of John B�s.

“Shot by Both Sides was a satirical site � not always satire of genius, but satirical nonetheless. John�s whole persona on that site was, from everthing I can tell, merely that � a persona, an exaggeration of some of the worst excesses of the internet. To take that into the real world is less than pathetic. It�d be akin to trying to get Swift booted out of the Church for writing �A Modest Proposal� � after all, if he wrote that the children of poor Irish people should be used as food, he simply MUST have meant it�”

And now the 600+ average unique daily visitors of Shot by Both Sides have discovered a part of their lives, albeit small, destroyed by the actions of a selfish, self-righteous arsehole who thinks that their ill-thought opinions are more important than anyone else’s enjoyment. Aside from the massive damage this has the potential to do to the concept of free speech in the British blogosphere as a whole, as we all now have to live in fear of some felchlugger causing us shit if they don’t like something we write, this is effectively the blogging equivalent of terrorism – only the person responsible didn’t even have the decency of either killing themselves at the same time or taking responsibility for their pathetically childish actions. Whoever you were, nice one. I hope you’re proud.